Work-items generically indicate single unit of work which needs to be completed, for instance, in the context of a project. Generally, a project is an undertaking devised to achieve an aim or a goal and includes a plan or scheme involving specific tasks and types of resources. Projects have methods or methodologies, which may define project phases, tasks and workflow, providing specific guidelines or specifications that should be followed in the process of completing a project. Unified framework and Rational® Unified Process are examples which provide such project methods. A project may be associated with a plurality of work-items. For instance, in the context of a software project, work-items include, but are not limited to, the following types of work: design documents, issues, risks, test cases, bugs, and others. In the context of a business transformation project, work-items include, but are not limited to, the following types of work: functional specification, technical specification, reports, interfaces, process definition, strategy, organizational change, and others.
Work-items can be linked according to different link relation types, including, but not limited to: Parent Of, Children Of, Relate to, Blocks, Input From, Output To, Designed In, Tested By, and others to create the basis for project governance and E2E Traceability. In the context of a project, when users create work-items, relations between work-items might not always be expressed because, for example, all team members may not be aware of all activities in team so as to draw the correct relations, also, for example, because many users may miss populating often verbose work-items type and linkages. Not creating accurate relations or links results in unclassified work-item and missing information.
In practical terms, unclassified work-items or missing connections between the work-items may mean increase in project risks, because for example it would be difficult to tell how closely a procedure that should have been followed with respect to a specific work-item was actually followed; slow down in project management, because for instance, multiple reports need to be created and manually re-conciliated through user interaction to have a comprehensive view of the status of the project; slow down in testing, for instance, because work-items may be tested even before their dependent ones are completed; limited efficiency, for instance, because users may be requested to fill in a large number of information for each work-item they create, which could be done automatically if link types or relations have been properly configured; limited comprehension of team working on a project, for instance, because people may not be able to envisage the traceability between different tasks and deliverables stemming from missing work-item types indicating input and output; and poor standardization.
Organizations may establish and/or utilize a standard method or procedure set as practice guidelines for a project. For instance, Rational® Unified Process, Agile Method, Scrum Method are examples of methods used for software engineering projects while Oracle® Unified Method and ASAP (Accelerated SAP®) are methods used in business transformation projects. Each method or procedure defines various tasks, work-products (and optionally other elements such as risks, outcomes) and their possible inter-relationships. Examples of relations may be predecessor—successor dependence between tasks and input-Output work-products from tasks. Standard tools operationalize those methods, and monitor E2E (End to End) traceability.